NAACP v. Lansing Bd. of Ed.

• Decision Date: 17 May 1976
• Docket Number: No. G305-72 C.A.,G305-72 C.A.
• Parties: NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR the ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE et al., Plaintiffs, v. LANSING BOARD OF EDUCATION et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Western District of Michigan

429 F. Supp. 583

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR the ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE et al., Plaintiffs, v. LANSING BOARD OF EDUCATION et al., Defendants.

No. G305-72 C.A.

United States District Court, W. D. Michigan, S. D.

May 17, 1976.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

John W. Davis, Lansing, Mich., for plaintiffs.

Fred C. Newman, Newman & Mackay, Lansing, Mich., for defendants.

OPINION

FOX, Chief Judge.

This school desegregation suit was commenced in 1972 to determine whether the Lansing Board of Education violated the constitutional rights of the district's school-children by denying them equal educational opportunity on the basis of race.

The court recognizes that the issues involved are of particular interest and vital significance to all Lansing area citizens. Therefore, this opinion is aimed at communicating the factual and legal bases for the court's decision, not only to the parties and reviewing courts, but also to the community. For it is the hope of the court that a sincere civic involvement in implementing the terms of this decision will help improve the school system and strengthen the community, for citizens of all races, and for their children.

The jurisdiction of this court is properly invoked under 28 U.S.C. Sections 1331(a), 1343(3), and (4), this being a suit in equity authorized by 42 U.S.C. Sections 1983, 1988 and 2000d. Jurisdiction is also invoked under 42 U.S.C. Section 1981 and further invoked under 28 U.S.C. Sections 2201 and 2202, this being a suit seeking a declaration that the February 1, 1973 resolutions of the Lansing Board of Education are unconstitutional, and seeking also other relief.

Individual plaintiffs are children or parents of children who, as a result of the June 29, 1972 desegregation plan adopted by the Lansing Board of Education, attend desegregated schools. Plaintiff, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Lansing Branch, is an unincorporated association which sues on behalf of its membership who are members of the plaintiff class. Plaintiffs are bringing this action on their own behalf and on behalf of all persons in the City of Lansing similarly situated. The class action is proper under Fed.R. Civ.P. 23. Because of the notoriety of the case in Lansing, the members of the plaintiffs' class have adequate notice.

The original and supplemental complaints alleged that actions of the Lansing Board of Education, especially the rescission of the June 29, 1972 desegregation plan (by its resolutions of February 1, 1973), were purposely taken to achieve segregative effects, in violation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and the Michigan Constitution. Plaintiffs' allegations that defendant has violated Michigan's State Constitution may properly be entertained by this court under the doctrine of pendent jurisdiction.

Following a full evidentiary hearing, the court issued a preliminary injunction on August 10, 1973, restraining the defendant Board of Education from implementing certain of its resolutions of February 1, 1973. The implementation of these resolutions would have effectively revised the Board's formal Policy Statement on Equal Educational Opportunity and would have nullified the desegregation plan which was voluntarily adopted by the Board on June 29, 1972 and partially implemented by it beginning in September 1972. The issues presently before the court are whether this preliminary relief should be made permanent, and whether school board officials are responsible for segregative conditions in the Lansing school system requiring further remedial action.

I.

The essence of plaintiffs' complaint in this case is an allegation of constitutional violations involving an inequity or inequality in public education deliberately created, maintained, and perpetuated by school officials. For reasons discussed in detail throughout this opinion, the court finds that the Lansing elementary schools¹ have in fact been racially segregated and that these segregative conditions are being perpetuated even now. The court finds as a matter of demonstrable fact and established law that this condition of segregation resulted in inequitable and unequal educational opportunities for Black and White students. Educational inequity is a necessary consequence of racial discrimination in and separation of the schools. The reasons which explain this fact are complex, being intricately rooted in the tortured history of race relations of this nation. Over the years, Black experience has been unique in American history. No other racial or ethnic minority was systematically enslaved by the White majority. Rather than having suffered the temporary discomfort and annoyance of social ostracism common to first-generation European ethnic groups, Blacks for hundreds of years were subjected to legally and socially institutionalized economic, spiritual, psychological, social and educational deprivation.

It is appropriate to note Gunnar Myrdal's observation on slavery in his classic, An American Dilemma, in his chapter on "Inequality of Justice:"

"Under slavery the Negro was owned, bought, and sold as property; he was worked, housed, fed, and prevented from doing what he wished if it was contrary to the interests of his master. In general, the Negro slave had no `rights' which his owner was bound to respect. Even if in legal theory the slave was given the status of a person under the law as well as the status of property, it was the latter viewpoint which, in practice, became the determining one. In the very relationship between master and slave it was inherent that — without recourse to courts — force and bodily punishment and, under certain circumstances, even the killing of the slave was allowed. `. . (A)ll slaveholders are under the shield of a perpetual license to murder,' exclaimed Hinton R. Helper in his unsparing on-slought on the plantation class and the slavery institution. Thomas Jefferson saw clearly the moral danger of the slavery institution:

`The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who, permitting one half the citizens to trample on the rights of the other, transforming those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of one part, and the amor patriae of the other. . . . Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.'"² (Emphasis supplied.)

Unfortunately, White attitudes originally attendant to the institution of slavery persisted after the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. Although legal slavery died, Americans created, during the four decades after the Civil War, a new legal and social pattern of discrimination based upon race. Many of these forms of institutionalized repression have persisted to the present, with the result that Black Americans are often denied the equality to which they are entitled in our constitutional democratic republic.

Inextricably intertwined with the dominating inescapable heritage of slavery and all its attendant dehumanizing ramifications, every aspect of the human condition of many Black people in America today is almost irremediably repressed. These continuing inhuman conditions of uncivilized servitude and inferior status have become known as vestiges of slavery.

The effects of this historical status of subservience and formalized inferiority continued to be pervasive. Past barriers to personal fulfillment and attainment cannot reasonably be minimized in assessing current impediments to equal opportunity. In the context of past officially sanctioned and present subtly insidious and invidious private and public racial discrimination against Black people as a class, a school environment which for whatever reason involves marked, disproportionate racial concentration inherently generates acute consciousness of race. As situated in segregated surroundings, this inflated consciousness triggers artificial, unrealistic personal reactions based on misconceived but, in view of historical predicates, understandable individual perceptions of the significance of racial differences.

Although disproportionate racial concentration of Black children in the schools might not have adverse consequences in all times and places, it certainly does in the context of the present forms of social organization, which are conditioned by legacy of slavery. One of the adverse effects of racial segregation is in the area of individual achievement.

Segregated Black children tend to infer that they are isolated from the White majority because of their race, and, drawing on their observations of the deprivations experienced by Black adults, they also tend to infer that their own potential is limited because of their race. It is not surprising that Black children have evidenced reduced self-esteem in a segregated environment and concomitant diminished motivation to succeed. The culturally-induced lack of self-esteem and diminished motivation in turn operate to measurably reduce achievement.

Individual growth in the educational system occurs not only in the area of achievement, the acquisition of cognitive skills, but also in the areas of social and psychological development. Segregation is perhaps more detrimental to the Black student's social and psychological development than to his achievement level. Finding himself isolated to a significant degree from the bulk of...